Trisha Gee will present “User’s Guide to the Disruptor”. The Disruptor is an open source concurrent programming framework developed by LMAX, a financial exchange based in London. While it is currently fashionable to talk about using languages or frameworks to hide away concurrent programming, the Disruptor provides a way to do quite the opposite – to enable developers to think about how to parallelise their architecture in a straightforward and easy to code fashion. In this presentation, Trisha Gee from LMAX will use her infamous diagrams to demonstrate how to dissect a problem into pieces in such a way that you can identify which parts are can run in parallel and how to manage dependencies between them. She then shows how you can translate this into an implementation using the Disruptor.

This is another chance to see the session given at QCon London and premièred earlier this year at Skillsmatter.

Last night, we took a look at two exciting and upcoming technologies, Xtend and Xtext. It was a very interesting event and ran from 6.30 pm until 8.30 pm- there was a lot of great discussion so thanks to everyone that contributed to the night.

Xtend is a new programming language designed specifically for Java developers, whilst Xtext is an open-source framework for developing domain specific languages.

The night kicked of with a few lightning talks from organisers and members of the London Java Community. First speaker was Matijn Verburg, who took to the stage to explain the benefits of adopting a JSR.

The other lightning talk was from Ged Byrne, who gave an excellent review of Ebin Hewitt’s book, Cassanda: the definitive guide.

We then moved on to our final presentation “Xtend and Xtext”, presented by Sven Efftinge and Sebastian Zarnekow.

The presentation showcased the two technologies very well and provoked a lot of debate. It’s very clear that Xtend and Xtext are going to have interesting futures in the world of software development.

Firstly, a massive thanks goes to Sven and Sebastian, who flew in all the way from Germany to give the presentation.

Big thanks also goes to both of our lightning talkers – there is a constant opportunity to get involved in these events – it’s a great way to escalate your profile which can lead to new opportunities and promotions, or just a way of sharing what you have learned with a group of enthusiastic developers. We can offer constructive feedback from experienced speakers so if you’re at all interested let me know.

Another big thank you to everyone that made it out last night. We are one of the most active Java User Groups in Europe and we’re keen to stay that way so if you have any feedback at all please let Barry or Martijn know.

We at RecWorks are proud to have been able to organise another event for the LJC. RecWorks is a specialist consultancy blending social networks and recruitment services to provide first class service to our clients. For a list of our latest jobs please see our jobs page here.

Finally, a big thanks goes to Skills Matter for hosting the event.

Here are a few words from SkillsMatter.

Skills Matter are very pleased to be able to continue to support the London Java Community. Follow us on Twitter and use the hashtag #javasm and see below for some upcoming Java related events we think you’ll love!

Progressive Java Tutorials (May 3-4, 2012)

The Progressive Java Tutorials will take place at Skills Matter over two days on May 3rd and May 4th! Experts including Jan Machacek, Tobias Ivarsson, Jon Jagger, Howard Lewis Ship, and Anirvan Chakraborty will be sharing the latest ideas and best practices in Java and Agile Development. To find out more, follow #progjava on Twitter or go here.

Scala Days (April 17-18, 2012)

Skills Matter and Typesafe are very excited to present Scala Days 2012, coming to London this April. Scala Days is the premier event for Scala enthusiasts, researchers, and practitioners. A central part of the Scala Days event will be the Third Scala Workshop, a forum to showcase and discuss a wide range of cutting-edge Scala research projects.

In addition to the Workshop, further Scala Days sessions will be devoted to technical talks, experience talks, and tool demonstrations, offering a comprehensive insight on all that is going on in the Scala world. We have also planned social lunches and an evening Scala Days Reception, which will offer further opportunities to meet and discuss with all the people that matter in the Scala world in a relaxed social context. To find out more, go here.

Are you waiting for closures in Java 8 or hoping for more type inference in Java 9? Thinking about switching to Scala or even holding your horses for Ceylon or Kotlin?
How about keeping Java where it seems fit, but replacing just its outdated parts with a concise and modern language? What about an enhancement to Java instead of yet another attempt to hire a killer.

Xtend is an an open-source programming language hosted at Eclipse.org and built for Java developers. It reuses Java’s keywords, terminology and concepts as much as possible, but abandons some dead freight at the same time. Xtend is a very powerful alternative for implementing Java classes and works great with all the existing libraries. Since the language can be seen as a little complementary add-on to Java, it offers many modern language features that you are currently missing in your daily work. Xtend comes with a variety of goodies reaching from type inference over closures and extension methods up to smart string interpolation that make development great fun, again. And of course there is powerful Eclipse IDE integration available.

In this session we will demonstrate why Xtend is so great for everyday programming. You will get an in-depth impression of the seamless integration with the Eclipse Java IDE and you’ll get an impression of the expressiveness and conciseness of Xtend.

Programming is great fun. Doing so in your own programming language even more so! Seriously, inventing yet another general purpose programming language is rarely a good idea. However, as you can imagine, Java isn’t the best choice in every case either. A small language well-suited to solve a specialized task concisely can improve the productivity of a whole team by orders of magnitude.

In this session you’ll learn how easy it is to create a highly expressive, statically typed domain-specific language with the help of the Xtext framework (http://www.xtext.org) . The good news is that you’ll end up not only with a fully-functional compiler but also a top-notch IDE as icing. All this and more for free, as in beer.

Who should attend:

– Java developers who are interested in writing code in a more concise and readable way but don’t want to switch to a completely new language.
– People who want to learn building nice little DSLs on the Java platform with little compromise and a sophisticated Eclipse integration in no time.

As always, it was a very successful evening with a lot of fun had by all. The Developer Sessions are a great chance for socialising and networking – developers from all over London come to discuss the latest cutting edge techs, talk about personal projects and problems they are facing.

Also thanks to all of our greeters, they really did help ensure the night went by smoothly. There is a constant opportunity to take part in these events so do please let us know if you would like to be involved next time.

A special thanks goes out to everyone that made it out the other night. We are one of the most active Java User Groups in Europe and we’re keen to stay that way, so if you have any feedback at all please let Martijn or myself know.

Finally, here at RecWorks, we are working with many of the best companies in London who are looking for Java developers. If you’re not happy in your current role then feel free to give us a call/email for an informal chat. We are far more interested in building long-term relationships than one off placements, but if you do feel you need a change then we would be happy to help. Please check out www.recworks.co.uk/jobs for the latest additions.

We are happy to announce the LJC Code Share for August. It is the first in a series of events focusing simply on the code. Not writing code, not code tools, but looking at the code itself.

The event is for anybody who cares about the code. You may be a beginner, looking to improve. You might be a grizzled old hacker who want to show how it’s done. We all have something to give and plenty to gain.

We will be reading code rather than writing it. Anybody who has something to share should just bring it along for everybody to see.

Is it an elegant solution you’re proud of? Let us all see it.

Are you facing a particularly knotty problem? Perhaps we can help.

Are you nervous about the code you are submitting for job applications? Get some positive feedback (and perhaps a little constructive criticism).

Do you have some have some other thoughts or ideas? If it’s about the code then we want to hear about it.

The format is open, driven by what people want to share. To help things along we will have a theme and a challenge. This month the theme is “achieving flow” and the challenge is “pulling tables out of a Word document.”

Achieving Flow

Coding is all about achieving flow. When programming we have to get ourselves into the zone. We have to reach a state of flow where we can hold all of the objects, variables and statements can pour out of our heads, through our fingers and into the editor.

The code we produce also needs to flow through so many forms and states. At one moment a person may be represented by a screen of fields. Then as a set of key-value pairs held in memory or as url-encoded text. Then as an XML document traversing an ESB finally to be bottled for weeks or months in the tables of a relational database. The person is always there, but the forms and representations are in a constant state of flux.

In our code sharing meet up we want to get to the heart of what programming is all about. We need to achieve flow to create code. Code is created to achieve flow. The moments when it all flows freely are the moments we are always seeking.

How do you achieve flow? Do you have some code that flows nicely? What impedes the flow?

Let’s get together and let the sharing flow.

The Coding Challange: Pulling Tables from a Word Document

The challange for this month is Pulling Tables from a Word Document.

Imagine that you have lots of Word documents and those documents contain lots of tables. Write some code to pull the data out of those tables and make them available for your code.

You can save the document in any format provided by Word: .DOC, .RTF, .HTML or any other format that Word will save.

This presentation covers the Clojure programming language and the Incanter system for statistical computing and will be presented by Ben Evans. Clojure is a Lisp dialect which runs on top of the JVM, and so our treatment is especially geared towards developers who are already proficient in the Java language and environment

Attendees will gain an understanding of:
* The pillars and fundamentals of Clojure
* Clojure’s novel language features and its powerful programming model
* Introduction to Incanter
* Why Clojure is a good language for statistical computing
* Exploring datsets with Incanter
* Interfacing with Excel and graphing and charting libraries
Who should attend:

– Java Developers
– Developers interested in modern implementations of Lisp or alternative JVM languages
– Technical architects, infrastructure engineers and others who need to deal with large amounts of data

Agenda:

18:00: Doors Open
18:30: A series of lightning talks from members of the London Java Community
19:00: Main presentation – Ben Evans will present Clojure and Incanter.
20:30: Networking

Bio:

Ben is one of the leaders of the LJC and GDC. He has had a varied and interesting career in technology – he was the lead performance testing engineer for the Google IPO (the largest auction ever conducted), worked on the initial UK trials of 3G networks with BT, built award-winning websites for some of Hollywood’s biggest hits of the 90s, rearchitected and reimagined technology helping some of the most vulnerable people in the UK and has worked on everything from some of the UKs very first ecommerce sites, through to multi-billion dollar FX trading systems. He is one of the authors of “The Well-Grounded Java Developer”.

There are those that have claimed that Java is getting a little bit long in the tooth. This month’s selection of Packt Publishing‘s books show just how fresh and relevant Java is for the future. You can read more on our new Book Club blog.

Manik Surtani will present “Infinspan, Data Grids and Cloud Storage” – A use-case driven talk on Infinispan, an LGPL licensed data grid platform for use as a distributed data cache, low-latency in-memory object database and cloud-ready datastore. This talk will focus on several popular usage patterns, explaining how these usage patterns work their way into common software designs we see today, and how the use of a data grid can bring benefits. For each pattern, specific details on setting up and tuning Infinispan to serve such a purpose will be discussed. The format will include a presentation and some sample code.

Who should attend:

– Java Developers
– Technical Architects
– Technically savvy CTOs

Agenda:

18:00: Doors Open
18:30: A series of lightning talks from members of the London Java Community
19:00: Main presentation – Manik Surtani will present Infinspan, Data Grids and Cloud Storage
20:30: Networking

Bio:

Manik Surtani is a core R&D engineer at JBoss, a division of Red Hat. He is the founder of the Infinispan project, which he currently leads. He is also the spec lead of JSR 347 (Data Grids for the Java Platform), and represents Red Hat on the Expert Group of JSR 107 (Temporary caching for Java). His interests lie in cloud and distributed computing, autonomous systems and highly available computing. He has a background in artificial intelligence and neural networks, a field he left behind when he moved from academic circles to the commercial world. Since then, he’s been working with Java-related technologies, first for a startup focusing on knowledge management and information exchange, and later for a large London-based consultancy as a tech lead focused on e-commerce applications on large Java EE and peer-to-peer technology. Surtani is a strong proponent of open source development methodologies, ethos, and collaborative processes, and has been involved in open source since his first forays into computing.

Cloud platforms are going to be essential for developers to get the most out of Cloud. This session will help understand what is available, how cloud platforms work, how to evaluate Platfom as a Service and dive into the WSO2 Stratos Cloud platform.

The session will be a combination of presentation and live demo. In the session, Paul will demonstrate Stratos, a complete cloud platform available as Open Source as well as running as-a-Service on the web. Paul will describe the multi-tenant and elastic features of Stratos as well as demonstrate the broad set of services available.

Paul Fremantle is CTO and Co-Founder at WSO2, where he is part of the team that created Carbon (an OSGi-based open source middleware platform) and Stratos (an open source Cloud Platform). Paul is VP of the Apache Synapse project and an Apache Member. Paul has over 10 years experience contributing to Open Source projects and wrote his first line of Java in 1995. Paul also plays the tin whistle so you all better hope the demo system is working.

Cloud Foundry – Peter Ledbrook

The cloud is the big software development story of 2011 and now is the time to find out why. This talk will look at one of several cloud hosting solutions for Java web applications: Cloud Foundry from VMware. Learn how it works and what it means for you as a software developer. How does it impact application development? What are the benefits? These questions and more will be answered.

This will mostly be a presentation with perhaps a small demo. I’ll start by covering what a PaaS and give a brief overview of the current landscape. I’ll then introduce Cloud Foundry and go into some of the detail of how it works. Most importantly, I’ll be talking about how one writes Java applications for it and how developers have to change the way they think. If I have time, I’ll finish up with a short demo of deploying a Grails application to Cloud Foundry.

Peter Ledbrook is the Grails Advocate at SpringSource, now a division of VMware. He has been working with Java for well over 10 years now and has plenty of experience of deploy Java web applications. He was involved with Cloud Foundry several weeks before the beta announcement and has intimate knowledge of Cloud Foundry from a user’s perspective.

Who should attend:

– Java developers with an interest in the Cloud
– Integration or workflow developers interested in running their code in a cloud platform
– Technical Architects with an interest in the Cloud
– Undergraduates with an understanding of Java and enterprise middleware.

Agenda:

18:00: Doors Open
18:30: A series of lightning talks from members of the London Java Community
19:00: Main presentation 1 – Paul Fremantle will present WSO2 Stratos Cloud Platform
19:45: Main presentation 2 – Peter Ledbrook will present Cloud Foundry
20:30: Networking

Please note this is an event organised for the London Java Community, the presenter has confirmed that it is suitable for entry level developers and undergraduates. SkillsMatter are hosting this event and are handling the attendance – it is essential that you confirm your place at this link: http://skillsmatter.com/event/java-jee/jvm-cloud-platforms/js-1945

Congratulations to the winners of our May draw – George Profenza and Martin Velicky!!

Good luck,

Barry Cranford

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What is the LJC

The London Java Community (LJC) is a group of Java Enthusiasts who are interested in benefiting from shared knowledge in the industry. Through our forum and regular meetings you can keep in touch with the latest industry developments, learn new Java (& other JVM) technologies, meet other developers, discuss technical/non technical issues and network further throughout the Java Community.